A later inroad was that of the Hittites, evidently a people having affinity with the Philistines and Egyptians, but whose chiefs and nobles seem to have been of Tartar blood, like the modern Turks. The names of their kings seem also to have been non-Semitic. Later, the great westward migration of Semitic peoples, to which that of Abraham himself belongs, not only introduced the Israelites but many nations of Semitic or mixed blood, the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Ishmaelites, &c., whom we find figuring in the Egyptian monuments as yellow or brownish people with a Jewish style of features, and all of whom, as mentioned above, would be known to the Egyptians and Canaanites as 'Hebrews.'[83] [83] This is independent of the question whether we regard the name Eber as that of an ancestor, or merely of men from beyond the Euphrates. Thus the monuments confirm the Jewish record, and the confusion which some ethnologists have introduced into the matter arises from their applying in an arbitrary manner the special tests of physical and philological characteristics, and neglecting to distinguish the primary migrations of men from subsequent intrusions. Another singular point of agreement is that, just as in Egypt we find men civilised from the first, so we find elsewhere. In Egypt writing and literature date from before the time of Abraham. In like manner we have no monumental evidence of any time when the Accadian people of Babylonia were destitute of writing and science, and we now find that there were learned scribes in all the cities of Canaan, and that the Phœnicians and Southern Arabians knew their alphabet ages before Moses, while even the Greeks seem to have known alphabetic writing long before the Mosaic age.[84] These men, in short, were descendants of the survivors of the Noachian Deluge, and therefore civilised from the first; and though we have no certain evidence of letters before the Flood, except the statement of the author of the Babylonian deluge tablets, that Noah hid written archives at Sippara before going into the ark, yet it is quite certain that men who could build Noah's ship are not unworthy ancestors of the Phœnician seamen, who probably launched their barks on the Mediterranean before the death of Noah himself. Thus, whatever value we may attach to the record in Genesis, we cannot refuse to admit that it is thoroughly consistent with itself and with the testimony of the oldest monuments of Asia and Africa, as it is also with the evidence of the geological changes of the pleistocene and early modern epoch. [84] Petrie, _Illahun, Kahun and Garob_, 1891.